by Aeon Authors
“I like your eye,” I told him. “I just…I like it.” Clutching the patch in my hand, I ran away again without saying goodbye at all.
Two Cairns for Apollo
Greg Beatty
Texas is a patchwork
of urban blights, suburban
sprawls, desert squares,
knit together by highway.
In a square beyond Houston
grow two piles, stones, mostly.
Mostly people assume
they’re residue from Houston’s
many boom-bust cycles:
expansions that didn't.
Like most folk beliefs
they are right. Right
and wrong. These stones
were thrown by hand,
one at a tired time
by weeping men, homeless
in their dreams of stars,
astronauts forever grounded,
who take spare moon rocks
and stray ablative tiles
to toss them atop the cairns,
twin piles, sleep and death,
as they depart mission control
crying, not counting, muttering,
“Houston, the eagle is buried.”
Praying they're wrong,
their handbuilt graves wasted,
fearing they’re right
in the terrestrial squares of Texas.
A Very Old Man With No Wings at All
Jay Lake
“‘A Very Old Man With No Wings At All’ is a result of my hubris as a writer. I had this narrow, tiny vision of Garcia Marquez and Milton locked in mortal combat, and took notes through the keyhole of my inner sight. Somewhat less metaphorically speaking, I've always been fascinated by the concept of a stranger in a strange land. This story talks about the strangest of strangers in the oldest of lands.”
THE HEAT WAS his oldest friend. In this place it wrapped him like the hand of the divine, vast and never-ending, flavored with salty grit as if God had lately been digging a grave in the sand. He had never understood how a place so close to the eye-blue sea could be so dry, either. The sun stole everything and gave back only light and shadow.
The old man lived beneath an ancient dhow long since taken by worms and the strange desiccation which eventually seized wood in this place. He liked to think of it as the process of making a fossil, direct petrification without benefit of æons of burial beneath the earth. The boat had once belonged to a man named Muusa. This always struck him as particularly appropriate, given the reed-banked sea muttering just outside the hull of his home.
Someone knocked on the wood. The old man started, unsure if he’d been sleeping, dreaming, or dying. He wasn’t certain there was a difference anymore.
“Enter into my presence,” he called in Adamic tongue. Remembering himself, he switched to Egyptian Arabic. “Peace to you.”
Butrus slipped between the hull and the sand. The boy lived in the fishing village perhaps ten minutes’ walk down the beach, and often visited. They traded stories, and the old man wheedled what little food he needed. Having never been young himself, he was vague on the ages of people, but Butrus always seemed a bit larger with each appearance.
“Oh, great sage,” said Butrus. He always talked like that. The old man suspected someone in the village had been reading to the boy. That sort of thing always ended in blood. “There are strangers come among us.”
“So?” He hated the whine that sometimes crept into his voice. He had been here far too long, but there was nowhere else to go. “There are always tourists. Smile and take their money. It is what you do, is it not?”
“No. Not tourists. Strangers. Different.”
There was something in the boy’s tone, the twitch of his eyes.
“Soldiers?” An image of men with crested helmets, carrying spears bladed like bronze leaves. No, no, that was wrong. Guns they had now. You could die before you ever heard the flutter of black wings crossing over your soul.
Some things were not right. People knew too much.
“They are angry, great sage. They search with boots and rifles.”
“For what?”
“You, sir.”
The old man thought about this a while. Butrus held still for a time, then began to wriggle. The old man mostly ignored the boy.
Who would come looking for him?
The heat brought memory, but memory was a broken kaleidoscope that someone had given him long ago, colored jewels that slipped between his fingers like fish too small for the net. The world had been air once, light and air without sun, stars, or world beneath. That he was certain of. Cast down, one could fall forever.
Laughing.
Free.
Tumbling.
Until earth was created beneath one’s feet.
Later there were trees. Monkeys screaming from branches. Muddy footprints saved in stone for the puzzlement of the future. God dictating to a mumbling fool with broken teeth and bad breath. Swords, some afire.
And people, little angels without wings, carrying their mortality leaden within their hearts. Sand…these people associated sand with time. He understood that. Sand was infinitely divisible and infinitely the same. Likewise time. There was only one moment, the present, but it was infinitely divisible into past and future.
It was those divisible moments that formed the shattered mirrors of his memory.
Noise brought him back. A flat crack, the same sound made by outstretched wings being torn free. Butrus shuddered and grabbed his knees. “They’re shooting now,” he said. Whimpering.
“Boy.” The old man’s voice was rough. “This is just a moment in the mind of God. It means nothing more than any other moment.”
The boy squeezed a tear, an offering. “My sister. She means something. Mama, my papa.”
Another crack. This one reminded him of how a hollow-boned body sounded, falling to earth from the infinitely divisible and unvarying altitude of grace.
“Please,” said Butrus. “You have power. We do not.”
“Power?” The old man was stung to laughter. He had lived beneath this dhow, a crab in a wooden shell, as long as he could remember. Everything else in his mind was a bright lie, a temptation apple-red. Even the apple was a lie. What power was there to a shattered memory and days spent gasping in the killing heat, nights spent listening to the plash of fish beyond the ankle-high surf?
“We are no one.” The boy was stubborn. “You are someone.”
His shoulders itched, now, muscles seeking something. He wore a faded burnous that covered him poorly. A Saxon—no, an Englishman—had given it to him some time ago, advising him to wash with kerosene to combat the lice.
When had he ever met a Saxon?
“I am no one. If they shoot, they shoot. If they kill, they kill. That is the way of soldiers.” The Saxon had been a soldier. An English soldier who pretended to be an Arab, with a motorcycle and fire-blue eyes that had seen the face of God. The old man had wondered where the land of Engle was, but the soldier had not troubled to tell him.
“You are the great sage.” Butrus’ face was closed, set. The boy was fighting, the old man realized, in the only way he knew how. Not even faith would stop bullets, or the rip of wings from a falling body. “You are someone, even if you do not remember. My grandfather says you have been here since the time of Caliphate.”
“That may be true,” the old man admitted cautiously. He searched his memory again, but all he found this time was heat. He could not remember the last time he’d crept out from beneath the hull to look up at the stars of heaven.
The boy brandished a pair of chicken feathers, his face quivering between triumph and utter collapse. “He told me you would need these.”
The old man gently took the feathers from between the boy’s trembling fingers. He turned them over, remembering again—pinions blacker than shadow, brighter than the fire in the sun. A span of wings which could cross the sky, brushing each horizon.
Oh, there had b
een glory once.
The stumps in his back wept fresh blood, staining the burnous a deeper brown.
“No,” he said slowly. Another series of shots rattled from down the beach. “I am not permitted to lift myself back up.”
Butrus began to cry, his little brown body shivering in the old man’s arms. How had he come to hold the boy? His back itched horribly, threatening to sprout anew. “No,” he whispered.
Pride. He had fallen once for pride; he would not fly again.
After a time, footsteps crunched on the sand outside. The boy’s tears were done. He lay limp on the old man’s lap. Already dead in truth, though the body breathed a little while longer. The old man knew this story. It was as old as the monkeys in the trees.
He touched the boy’s back, drawing forth the secrets locked in the letters hidden deep within the flesh. Like the kaleidoscope of his memory, all creation remembered what it had been. The chicken feathers helped, guiding him.
It took a great deal of time, but time was infinitely divisible. He watched a bullet burrow slowly through the brittle wood of the hull, but kept at his work. He saw two more follow. Still the old man worked.
“I have no gifts,” he whispered, “only knowledge.”
He set the boy free in a flurry of feathers as the wood of the dhow began to collapse. The bullets did not find the old man, any more than the weapons of the world ever would. The boy leapt upward into the bright sunlight in a spray of salt and sand. The old man was so much spindrift to the hard men on the beach.
“A gull,” one of them said in disgust. Another loosed a stream of gunfire into the sky, then gave up.
Only a moment in the mind of God, the old man thought, his back twisting in a vain attempt to take flight as a bright bird soared above the eye-blue sea, keening sorrow for its lost boyhood. He crawled into the shattered shadow of his boat and carefully sorted the bright jewels of memory, hoarding what he could.
The Underthing
Ryan Neal Myers
“There have been plenty of stories about adults being unable to shake the not-so-imaginary friends/boogeymen of their early childhoods. But they’re usually about letting go of the past, exorcising personal demons, or driving wooden stakes through cold, beating hearts, and I’ve always thought such solutions to be far too easy. I mean, what if you and It actually liked each other? What if your friendship with It contained just as much mutual jealousy and selfishness and compassion as any other relationship? And what if It could eat you if you made It angry?”
AFTER BRUSHING HER TEETH and changing into her pajamas, Constance retrieves the half-pound of ground beef that has been rotting for three days on her apartment balcony. It smells like vomit, but she’s used to it. She zaps it back to room temperature in the microwave, then carries it to the bedroom on a Fiestaware plate.
She pauses in the little bedroom, her toes pinching the carpet fibers as she thinks of what to say. On the wall is a body-length mirror, and she studies herself to see if she looks the way she feels. The worry on her face is hard to notice because her face is small and unreadable. She doesn’t have enough nose, and her dark eyes are sunk too deep behind her glasses. Her small frame is lost in the baggy folds of her pajamas.
“I smell beef,” says the low octave hum under the bed. “Ground. Lean. But you know I like the fat.”
For most people it takes more muscles to frown than to smile, but Constance isn’t wired like most people.
“You’re eating beef while I’m eating ramen, and you’re complaining?” she says, her voice almost as husky as the Underthing’s.
“It’s late,” says the Underthing. “I can smell how tired you are.”
“That’s my facial cream.”
“Is something wrong?”
How can she tell the Underthing about Bran? She thanks God for the Underthing’s blindness, or it would’ve noticed she’s been wearing contacts for the past week whenever she leaves the house.
“I’m tired,” she says.
“That’s what I’m saying,” says the Underthing.
Constance places the plate of rotting beef on the carpet, two feet from the edge of the bed-skirt.
A pair of black tentacles snatch the plate and scoop it under the bed like a gambler raking in chips.
“Go to sleep,” the Underthing hums around a mouthful of half-digested beef.
“Do you think I’m pretty?” says Constance with a sigh, not really asking, but simply preparing the Underthing for future discussions.
“You smell good to me,” it says.
“You’re useless,” says Constance.
She makes a running leap for the bed, landing on her knees in the middle of the mattress, something she’s practiced since she was a little girl. She slips under her sheets and reaches for the rotary switch hanging from the nightstand lamp.
“Goodnight,” says the Underthing, lips smacking.
“Whatever,” says Constance as she clicks the room into darkness. Years of sleeping above the Underthing have dulled the urge to pull the covers tight about her neck, but tonight she returns to the old habits, curling up small in the middle of the mattress. She doesn’t know what frightens her more: the Underthing’s untested jealousy, or the last few barriers she must lower to save herself from becoming an old woman who takes in stray cats. The Underthing would eat the cats, anyway.
Constance’s mind runs in circles as she closes her eyes, but the slow grind of the Underthing’s teeth soon lulls her to sleep, as it always has.
Constance wears contact lenses when she goes to the used bookstore downtown. It’s a hole-in-the-wall with its entrance in a back alley, a place frequented by college students and aging hippies.
Constance stands before a bookcase labeled “Our Recent Reads.” One of the shelves is labeled “Bran,” and it’s filled with everything from classic pulp to James Joyce. The most recent addition is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
From the corner of her eye she can see Bran at the far end of the store, shelving books. He’s twenty pounds overweight, but he’s tall and carries it well. He needs a haircut, but it’s all there. And as Constance pulls Heart of Darkness, Bran notices. He notices her every time she comes in.
“There are only three types of people who read that,” Bran drones as he walks toward her, his voice almost as deep as the Underthing’s. “English majors, the girlfriends of English majors, and people who just want to know what all the hubbub is about. Which are you?”
“Hubbub,” says Constance.
Bran stops in front of her with a smile. “Good. So you’ve never read it.”
“Nope.”
“You’ll hate it, but I won’t hold it against you.”
“Is this your favorite book?”
“No,” says Bran. “Just my most recent read.”
“So what’s your—”
“No, I hate that question. I don’t know you well enough to answer that yet.”
“Forgive me for being so forward.”
“Your name’s Constance, right?” Bran asks.
“How did you know that?”
“You wrote a check last time you were here.”
Constance feels as if she’s the only woman in town, though she can hear other patrons in the aisles behind her. She doesn’t know if she wants Bran to see her blush.
“Oh yeah,” she says.
Bran points to the book in her hand and says, “If you ever read that, I want to know what you think. It’s a short read, not a major loss if you find it a waste of time.”
“Isn’t this one of those books,” says Constance, “that everyone wants to say they’ve read, but no one actually does?”
“Yep.”
Constance hands the book to Bran. “I’ll give it a shot.”
Bran smiles.
In the dark of her living room/kitchen/dining room, Constance reads Heart of Darkness aloud. She wears her glasses as she sits on the loveseat, her knees drawn up to her chest and the book on her knees, the way she has
always sat since she was a little girl.
“‘…No, it is impossible, it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone….’”
“Conrad has a very low ratio of content-to-prose,” says the Underthing from beneath the loveseat.
Constance lays the book down on her knees. “Yeah, I know.”
“You’ve been reading for a couple hours already and how many things have actually happened? Cut out all the pointless abstractions and you’ve got a ten page short story.”
“Some of it’s kind of pretty though.”
“Let’s go back to what we normally read,” says the Underthing.
“And what’s that?”
“Stories with plots.”
Constance stares at the book on her knees. She wants to finish it for Bran’s sake, but she wonders if she’s changing her routines too quickly. She wonders if the Underthing smells love the way sharks smell blood in the water.
“We’re already halfway done,” she says. “Don’t you want to be able to say you’ve read Heart of Darkness?”
“Either you’re wearing contact lenses during the day or you’re walking around blind,” says the Underthing.
